by Jim Lehrer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 2006
Bad news indeed: unconvincing and instantly forgettable.
The Washington newsman’s 16th novel portrays the misadventures of a “straight and dull clothing salesman” who fabricates a new life that he can’t fit comfortably into.
Middle-aged Hugo Marder, a suit salesman at upscale Washington, D.C., store Nash Brothers, impulsively purchases on eBay a Silver Star awarded for heroism to a Vietnam veteran. Wearing its lapel pin in public, he’s immediately congratulated and admired by one and all—and, to his gratified surprise, Hugo’s “childhood dream” of becoming a Marine appears to be coming true (though false). Barely surviving a challenging conversation with a real Marine in a Thai restaurant (where some quick thinking on Hugo’s part defuses a potentially violent situation), he allows himself to believe he may actually be a hero. He exercises, loses weight, shaves his head and struts convincingly. Attending a “Semper Fidelis seminar” at the Smithsonian, he commands praise from luminaries like Art Buchwald and Mark Russell. Then, reporting for jury duty, Hugo encounters his hardnosed ex-wife Emily, a political secretary with urgent ambitions. She seems about to unmask him, until a threatened courtroom shootout inspires Hugo to act in a manner consistent with his newly created image. The D.C. Medal of Honor is presented to him (along with Emily’s rekindled sexual attention), and—lo and behold—Conscience appears. Requesting and receiving a transfer to Nash Brothers’ Dallas branch, Hugo finds more challenges, and eventually resolves to Make Things Right. But the culture (and, more particularly, the media) needs heroes—and he’s left to live unhappily and guiltily ever after. If the irony that attends this novel’s dénouement had been anywhere present in the slack, name-dropping, meandering pages leading up to it, the story might have managed a semblance of credibility. No such luck.
Bad news indeed: unconvincing and instantly forgettable.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6486-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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